The poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in Amherst, Massachusetts, a world away from the beloved Kashmir of his childhood, twenty-one years ago today. The title of the book he published that year, Rooms Are Never Finished, testifies to the unfinished work of a writer whose life ended too soon, at the age of fifty-two.

In his first poem published in The Paris Review, “Snow on the Desert,” Ali wrote about another singer interrupted mid-performance:

                          in New Delhi one night as
Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It

was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
perhaps there were sirens,

Why Pinocchio is still so disturbing – 150 years on

From Better Call Saul and Abbott Elementary to Andor and Top Boy

This text was delivered as the T.S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022.

In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.

Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

***

Marcus, Luke and Pete pile into the studio after Morocco only bloomin’ went and did the Spanish! How’s Luis Enrique going to Twitch about this one…

We discuss why the Spanish keep coming unstuck, why Samuel Eto’o kneed a man in the head, and why Portugal were so, so much better without Ronaldo. We also celebrate two forces that have been with us since the dawn of time – Pepe and Wayne Rooney. Wazza is just the gift that keeps on giving.

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Close to nature and beautifully minimalist – five Zen-like Japanese interiors

Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It’s a fair question. Most of the time, I’ll mention a play only to complain about it at length—the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he’d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me—and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation.

Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when plays go right. There is, for instance, Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude,” in which a London actor finds herself part of a troupe putting on Hamlet in the West Bank. You’ll also find an excerpt from Old Actress, a new play by Lucas Hnath. It’s set in the living room of a woman who is struggling to memorize her lines for a production of a play called Death Tax (also by Hnath) and who has enlisted a younger and far less successful actor to help her learn them. On the page, the script’s dialogue looks worryingly avant-garde—the punctuation and spacing are a copyeditor’s nightmare. But read aloud—my deputy, Lidija, and I tried it, surreptitiously, in my office—it is almost eerily naturalistic, such that you wonder why some playwrights pretend people speak in perfect paragraphs.

As Colm Tóibín tells Belinda McKeon in a new Art of Fiction interview—in which he also discusses the uses of trauma and his hatred of the pluperfect—writing a first draft can feel as alarming and adrenalized as any live performance. In preparing to write the part of Nora Webster  in which Nora thinks she’s seen her dead husband, Tóibín spent several days alone at his County Wexford home, reading other works in which ghosts appear. Then, one morning, he got up early and put Beethoven’s Archduke Trio on repeat. “I knew it could only be written in one go,” he says. “I had to get every moment of it down as though it were happening in real time.”

Reading certain short stories can feel like watching a dangerous solo sport; I’m drawn to the ones that stay on course even as they remind me how easy it would be to crash that Alpine A522. So it is with Sophie Madeline Dess’s troubling “Zalmanovs”; Addie E. Citchens’s brilliant, unruly “A Good Samaritan”; and Avigayl Sharp’s “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant,” a bravura portrait of frenetic self-absorption.

Also in this issue: an Art of Poetry interview with N. Scott Momaday, our 2021 Hadada Award winner; portfolios by Lily van der Stokker and Mary Manning; and poems—selected by our new poetry editor, Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy—by C. S. Giscombe, Timmy Straw, Cynthia Cruz, and Victoria Chang. What’s nice about reading is that you don’t need a ticket, you can do it in bed, and there are no shoddy performances. As Jung once said, in the theater of dreams, the dreamer plays every role.

12 min read

Mass grave of murdered Vikings sheds light on King Aethelred’s doomed reign

A mass grave is unearthed

In January 2008, Thames Valley Archaeological Services began excavations near St John’s College, in preparation for the construction of a new accommodation building. They quickly discovered the remains of a 4000 year old neolithic henge, one of the largest ever found in Britain. Upon further investigation, broken pottery and food debris were found, indicating that the henge had been effectively used as a landfill site during the Middle Ages, thousands of years after it was constructed. However, it quickly became apparent that the site contained something far more significant, when human bones began to appear. It was a mass grave, bodies piled unceremoniously on top of each other. After a month of digging, the team concluded that they had unearthed the skeletal remains of 37 people.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the bones dated from AD 960 to 1020, the late Anglo-Saxon period. But, although mass executions were not unheard of in this time period, the remains were not consistent with those found at previously discovered mass execution sites.

The skeletons were all of fighting age men, ranging from their late teens to mid-thirties, and were unusually tall for the period. Analysis of atomic variations within the bones revealed that the men’s diets consisted largely of fish and seafood, which was not typical of the Anglo-Saxons, strongly suggesting that these were the remains of Vikings.  Given the evidence, it seemed probable that this mass grave might be archaeological evidence of the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002, in which the Anglo-Saxon king of England, Aethelred, ordered the extermination of all Danes living in England.

How were the victims killed?

It was concluded that the bodies had suffered extremely violent deaths. They had been brutally stabbed, with puncture marks in their vertebrae and ribs, and had suffered multiple blows from simultaneous attackers. One had been decapitated, with others showing evidence of attempted decapitation. Among the 37 victims, 27 had broken or fractured skulls, indicating traumatic head injuries. A detail that stood out as particularly significant to the archaeological team was the charring on some of the remains.

I’m living in East London, in Cadogan Terrace, at the far end of Victoria Park. I work as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph, typing in stories dictated over the phone. (This was a very long time ago.) Sometimes it is crown green bowls, sometimes it is a yachting regatta in Pwllheli. Sometimes it is a massacre in Bosnia. On a whiteboard are names we might find hard to spell: Izetbegović. Banja Luka. Srebrenica.

I bicycle to Canary Wharf down Grove Road. The last of a row of terrace houses is in scaffolding, then gradually uncovered to reveal a concrete shell. For a long time I thought this was just the way houses looked beneath the skin, but this is, in fact, Rachel Whiteread’s House, which will go on to win the Turner before being demolished by the council.

Whiteread makes casts of the space enclosed by ordinary objects, using the object as mold. (This generally destroys the object. Space repays the violence inflicted by the objects which imprison it.) Whiteread will go on to create Water Tower, a resin cast of a water tower, and Nameless Library, a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, of which more later.

I have bought a small blond upright piano for £900 despite my low pay.

If context is everything in art, how does placing an art show in the middle of the sea change our experience of the work? That’s the obvious question posed by New York’s Half Gallery, which hosted the second iteration of one-day Miami Art week pop up Stiltsville Thursday. 

If nothing else, it made for quite the adventure for the 130 collectors, artists, and art world hangers-on (including yours truly) that braved the two-hour sea journey to the Bay Chateau, one of six houses still standing in Stiltsville. With guests traveling throughout the morning, the weather alternated between clear, bright sun and a steely downpour with gusts of powerful wind, until the boat reached its far-out destination for a genial afternoon of art, swimming, and sun. 

Stiltsville is a collection of houses built in Biscayne Bay, off the coast of Miami, in the 1930s. For decades, the houses, of which there were 27 at peak, were a major nightlife attraction, featuring restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and gambling houses. Illicit activity hidden from prying eyes was the allure. The surviving houses have become landmarks in Biscayne National Park.

“I think traveling via boat with a small group of other art lovers is more unique than bumping into someone at a fair,” Half Gallery’s director Erin Goldberger said in a statement. 

That’s an understatement. Between the mildly treacherous sea journey, a healthy amount of cocktails, and the convivial air from the many friends and family of the artists and gallery present, it was a unique experience indeed.